Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for this daily challenge. It’s Thursday, the day we try to apply and live out what we’ve learned this week from the Bible. This week we’ve been studying Jesus as a teacher, and much more than just a teacher.

We explored yesterday how Jesus claimed the old testament promises that God would send a Messiah to rescue the world from all its pain and dysfunction. In his hometown, he read one of those promises from the Bible, then said had been fulfilled on that very day, then sat down.

He didn’t try to justify himself at all, just sat down.

Why? What was he trying to say? First, that these words were God’s words, they didn’t need justification. God was going to do all these things, and they were good.

But he wanted to say the same thing about his words – that they were just like God’s words – because they were God’s words.

He spoke and acted this way to teach something about the kingdom of God. But he was also teaching about himself and his role in the kingdom. He could simply speak it into being. When he read God’s words about an ideal future state, he could then simply declare it to be happening at that moment.

He was a good teacher, yes, but he was also showing himself to be God, and therefore the bringer of God’s kingdom. He was showing himself to be the king, and that the kingdom surrounded him when he said so.

The kingdom of God was his way of describing the way the world was created to be, and the way it would once again be.

Not something we can bring about ourselves, but rather something that Jesus brings to our broken, hopeless world.

Challenge: How will you respond to Jesus’ teaching, and the immediacy of it? What signs of God’s kingdom do you see, and what can cause you to delay or ignore taking action?